When it comes to competition, most people think men are the more aggressive and competitive sex. After all, we often see men battling for dominance, leadership roles, and even partners. But beneath the surface, women might be even more competitive just in a different way.
Based on evolutionary psychology, men and women evolved to adopt different success strategies. Men compete with one another for female attention. Women compete with one another for access to crucial resources necessary to ensure they raise healthy children such as social support, economic stability, and secure relationships.
The Science Behind Female Competition
This form of same-sex competition is referred to as intrasexual competition and it's all about competing for valuable advantages that increase one's probability of achieving success in life and reproduction.
Why the disparity? Evolution comes into it here. Because women generally spend more time and effort bringing children up from conception to child-rearing they're understandably more concerned with long-term care and secure environments. Men, on the other hand, have more to lose in terms of reproduction if they don't impress a potential partner with strength, status, or confidence.
So, men just tend to use obvious and overt forms of competition such as physical fighting or public displays of dominance. Easy to notice. But women use indirect and subtle competition such as judging, social exclusion, or reputation wars.
And that's why female competition is sneakier but sometimes even fiercer.
A Global Study Reveals the Hidden Rivalry
In a 2023 Nature study, scientists investigated why and how women and men respond when someone of the same gender holds a desirable asset whether beauty, a good job, a good partner, or social status.
The researchers collected data from 596 married parents aged 25–45 years from three nations. They asked them to forecast how other people of their own gender would feel regarding peers who enjoyed some advantages.
Here's how the data broke down:
- Women were much more likely than men to think that other women would respond negatively to a same-sex peer who had something they didn't.
- This held true across the board whether the something was having a better home, a high-status occupation, physical attractiveness, or a cool and confident personality.
- Strangely, this negative competitiveness was largely aimed at same-sex peers. Women criticized men less who enjoyed these perks.
So, it's not that women are more judgmental in general it's that they are more sensitive to how they compare to other women in their social circle.
What It Really Means
The research refutes the myth that men are inherently competitive. Male competition may be boisterous and physical, but female competition is usually subtle, strategic, and emotional but equally intense.
They are also more likely to pay attention when other women are improving, particularly in terms of long-term security and social status. And that's probably because, from an evolutionary perspective, these discrepancies do count for parenting and having good social relationships.
This does not imply that women are "mean" or "toxic" but that they are sensitive to social ranks and fairness about resources, particularly at the peer level.
Final Thoughts
So the next time someone tells you, "Men are just more competitive," reconsider. Science indicates that women might be more competitive with one another, particularly when it comes to what truly counts in life: family, security, and social status.
And the best news? Learning about these latent dynamics will enable us to support one another more effectively because awareness is the precursor to change.